Estimating future global per capita water availability based on changes in climate and population

Human populations are profoundly affected by water stress, or the lack of sufficient per capita available freshwater. Water stress can result from overuse of available freshwater resources or from a reduction in the amount of available water due to decreases in rainfall and stored water supplies. Analyzing the interrelationship between human populations and water availability is complicated by the uncertainties associated with climate change projections and population projections. We present a simple methodology developed to integrate disparate climate and population data sources and develop first-order per capita water availability projections at the global scale. Simulations from the coupled land–ocean–atmosphere Community Climate System Model version 3 (CCSM3) forced with a range of hypothetical greenhouse gas emissions scenarios are used to project grid-based changes in precipitation minus evapotranspiration as proxies for changes in runoff, or fresh water supply. Population growth changes, according to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) storylines, are used as proxies for changes in fresh water demand by 2025, 2050 and 2100. These freshwater supply and demand projections are then combined to yield estimates of per capita water availability aggregated by watershed and political unit. Results suggest that important insights might be extracted from the use of the process developed here, notably including the identification of the globe's most vulnerable regions in need of more detailed analysis and the relative importance of population growth versus climate change in altering future freshwater supplies. However, these are only exemplary insights and, as such, could be considered hypotheses that should be rigorously tested with multiple climate models, multiple observational climate datasets, and more comprehensive population change storylines.